A New a Posteriori Error Estimate for Adaptive Finite Element Methods

Abstract

In many scientific problems, adaptive finite element methods has been widely used to improve the accuracy of numerical solutions. The general idea is to refine or adjust the mesh such that the errors are “equally” distributed over the computational mesh, with the aim of achieving a better accurate solution using an optimal number of degrees of freedom. By using the information from the approximated solution and the known data, the a posteriori error estimator provides the information about the size and the distribution of the error of the finite element approximation. There is a large numerical analysis literature on adaptive finite element methods, and various types of a posteriori estimates have been proposed for different problems, see e.g. [1]. The a posterior error estimate and adaptive finite element method were first introduced by [2]. Since the later 1980s, much research work on a posteriori error estimate has been developed including the residual type a posteriori error estimate [8], recovery type a posteriori error estimate [16], a posteriori error estimate based on hierarchic basis [5, 4], and so on. For the literature, the readers are referred to the books [1, 3, 12, 14], the papers [6, 13, 15], and the references cited therein.